Hller, Christian; Rancire, Jacques: The Abandonment of Democracy. In: DOCUMENTA MAGAZINE N3, 2007, Education, pp 22-29.

Jacques Rancire is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. Christian Hller is coeditor of springerin: Hefte fr Gegenwartskunst, Vienna. While the Western democratic system is still presenting itself as a model for the rest of the world, it is facing all sorts of internal challenges. A fundamental attack has been launched for some time from the position of a power elite that is pitching itself as the true defender of Western democratic values. Jacques Rancire, in taking aim at this position, not only brings to the fore what a contemporary understanding of the political might be all about, but he also sets out to defend the democratic principle in its most comprehensive conception a defense whose repercussions are as relevant for critical art practices as they are for new modes of political learning. CH Political action is, according to your conception of the democratic process, primarily about bringing into play claims by those who have not been considered to be legitimate political subjects so far (migrants, asylum seekers, undocumented workers, etc.). While this is surely aimed at an enlargement of the public sphere, I am wondering if this does not situate politics in realms totally different from the traditionally understood political arena zones of civil life, spheres of culture, etc. At the same time, all those dispersed theaters of the political seem to move politics ever further away from decision-making processes. Can you comment? JR I dont propose a view of politics that brings it back to claims made by outsiders. The part of those who have no part is not simply the part of the asylum seekers and the undocumented workers. Politics is not about integrating the excluded in our societies. It is about restaging matters of exclusion as matters of conflict, of opposition between worlds. The global logic of our world has it that all obstacles to the circulation of wealth have to be dismissed while the circulation of persons must be strictly controlled. The same powers open the borders to wealth and close them to the poor. This is what ties the struggles about immigration with the struggles against the dismantlement of social security systems, the reforms of the laws on employment, or of educational systems based on the sole logic of the market, etc. On all these points, there is a topography of the possible that is decided by national and international powers, and there are forms of refiguration of the possible created by the initiative of workers, students, etc., who embody the part of those who have no part. The problem is not so much the decentering of the political sphere as it is the enlargement of that sphere. CH A quite inuential strand of contemporary thinking identies sovereignty in todays democracies with an omnipresent state of exception, sees the nmos of modernity in the camp, and considers more or less all political life (bos) reduced to bare life (zoe).7 What role does the democratic principle, the way you conceive it, assign to the notion of bare life? Is it really the inescapable condition that all possible participation in the democratic process is heading toward? JR The notion of bare life has been borrowed from Hannah Arendt, who had borrowed it from the aristocratic tradition that reserved the political stage to those who were free from the necessity of dealing with reproducing life and earning their livings. Politics begins with the refusal of the distinction, with the affirmation that people who were just living could participate in the conguration of the common world and that matters of bare life employment, sexual roles, health, etc. were also matters of collective deliberation and decision. The democratic principle is that
7 Cf. the discussion of Giorgio Agamben's Homo sacer in Jacques Rancire, Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? in South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no.2/3 (2004), pp. 297-310.

there is no frontier between bare life and political life, that this frontier is a political issue at stake. The police law is not a state of exception. Instead it is politics, which consists in creating a tissue of exceptions to the police law. CH A question related to the idea of bare life concerns the proper democratic conception of the people. They are considered as idiotic, self-indulgent, egotistical consumers by one extreme position, as the multitude that carries all future revolutionary hope by others, or as Deleuze had it a kind of empty signier that points to something which is always missing. How does democratic thinking the way you understand it (and in distinction to the three positions mentioned) conceive of the people? JR The first two conceptions have something in common. Both have a positivistic conception of the people. They identify it with a form of society or with the deployment of productive forces. From my point of view, the people of democracy is not a social group, not an accumulation of productive forces. It is created by forms of subjectivization, by the configuration of dissensual scenes. The political people exists only when it disrupts the police distribution of the shares allowed to different parts of the society. It is missing as a social body, but it exists in the present through the construction of its own space. It is not the people of a democracy to come. CH With respect to a proper assessment of todays political realities you state that we do not live in democracies, neitherdo we live in camps.8 Leaving the camp and the state of exception aside for the moment, my question is if democracy, according to your view, is something not realized yet, or quite to the contrary something like an ever-receding horizon, a state of affairs that is unrealizable in principle? JR Democracy is an unattainable future only if we think of it as a perfect constitution or a state of perfect equality. That is not at all my conception. For me the not yet cannot be separated from an already now and here. Democracy exists only through its own acts and through the fabric of common life that these acts weave. It is not unrealizable in principle. It is a principle that we have always known as intertwined with its opposite and as relentlessly striving against it. The horizon of equality is not what determines a march toward an unattainable state of perfection. It is what frames the stage on which we can think and act. CH For quite some time, we have witnessed attempts to democratize the arts and culture quite generally. Democratization has not only meant to make art more accessible and collapse hierarchies of high and low, but also to efficiently politicize it. Where, in your opinion, might a profound politicization and application of the democratic principle in contemporary art, start from one that would go beyond a mere thematization of political issues? JR We must take into account that art has its own politics, which does not dovetail with attempts at politicizing it. The paradox of the aesthetic regime of art is that art produces political effects out of the very separation of the aesthetic sphere which is not tantamount to the autonomy of the artwork, since this separation of a sphere of experience goes along with the loss of any determined criterion of difference between what belongs to art and what belongs to nonartistic life. What characterizes contemporary art is the way in which this disjointed junction between aesthetic separation and artistic indistinction becomes the form and matter of art. It means that its form of efciency consists in the blurring of the borders, in the redistribution of the relations between spaces and times, between the real and the ctional, etc. In this respect it can play a role against the logic of consensus: What characterizes mainstream fiction, the fiction of the police order, is that it passes itself off as real, that it pretends to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the
8 Jacques Rancire, Hatred of Democracy trans. Steve Corcoran (London/New York, 2006). Originally published as La Haine de la dmocratie (Paris, 2005), p. 73.

obviousness of the real and what belongs to the eld of appearances, representations, opinions and utopias. And it also pins down groups to their identity, as Godard pointed out by saying that the epic was for the Israelis and the documentary for the Palestinians. It is not a question of reversing the roles, it is a question of creating room for play, where the distribution between epics and documentaries can be blurred. Contemporary art can certainly play a part in this respect, even more so as political groups dont play it much today. Now this does not mean that artistic practice has become political practice, as some theorists assert it. They tend to identify artistic performance with new political activism on the ground that we are in a new age of capitalism when material and immaterial production, knowledge, communication, and artistic performance would fuse together in one and the same process of implementation of collective intelligence. In my view, this is a too easy way of erasing the specificities of both artistic and political dissensuality and of reviving the avantgardist gure of the producer who is at the same time a worker, an artist, and the builder of a new world. There are many forms of collective intelligence just as there are many ways of performing and many stages of performance.